Galaxy may miss its supermassive black hole, NASA says

Astronomers still wonder why they aren’t detecting a supermassive black hole (SMBH) at the center of the bright cluster galaxy Abell 2261 (A2261-BCG). Despite recent observations with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Telescope and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, there is little evidence of a colossal black hole expected in a galaxy at the heart of the cluster. The observations, detailed in an article in an American Astronomical Society (AAS) journal, postulate that this galaxy has undergone a merger with another galaxy in the past, which could have caused the ejection of a black hole. larger newly formed. Or says NASA, their observations just weren’t sensitive enough to pick up the signatures of such a colossal black hole. Located over 2 billion light years away in the constellation Hercules, astronomers used Chandra to search for overheated material falling towards the black hole and producing x-rays, but failed to detect such a source. The authors concluded that there was no black hole at any of these locations, or that it was attracting material too slowly to produce a detectable X-ray signal. Still, it’s pretty certain that this galaxy has or has had a giant black hole at some point, Sarah Burke-Spolaor, a University of West Virginia astrophysicist and co-lead author of the article, told me. But that has so far eluded extensive research using some of the world’s most sensitive optical, x-ray and radio telescopes, she says. But the team used one of the best x-ray telescopes ever built to observe this cluster for a total of 36 hours, and they are still not detecting this missing black hole.

The observations, detailed in an article in an American Astronomical Society (AAS) journal, postulate that this galaxy has undergone a merger with another galaxy in the past, which could have caused the ejection of a black hole. larger newly formed. Or says NASA, their observations just weren’t sensitive enough to pick up the signatures of such a colossal black hole.